Give A Drop

Dear Friends, EDAs, and PCW Family -

As we head into Christmastime and start looking ahead at the New Year, I start to take stock of everything I've accomplished this year and think about what lies ahead. Do you all do that too around this time of year?

Kase's birth was obviously the biggest thing that happened to me - I mean ever! The most important role I will ever serve is as a mother. But something else I'm really proud of that you may not know as much about is the work I do with the charity I founded in 1997, Project Clean Water, to help other moms around the world.

I actually started the organization way before I was even thinking of motherhood: I had a kidney infection when I was living out of my van, and realized what a struggle it can be to get clean water when you can't just turn on a tap. Once I learned that there are people who struggle with this every day, I knew I had to do something. I was able to put about 35 clean water wells in 15 different countries, but felt I could do even more for those suffering if i could find the right partner, and finally i found not only one great partner, but two! In 2009 my charity partnered up with the Voss Foundation and Virgin Unite for a campaign we call Give A Drop.

Through our partnership, we have built 9 wells in communities in Mali, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo allowing over 100,000 people access clean, drinkable water!

It is so important to realize how lucky we are to have access to water daily, since in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, over 300 million people lack access to clean drinking water. That's almost the entire population of the United States!

I'm particularly happy that our 2011 water project was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was recently ranked the second most dangerous country in the world for women and where 20% of children don't live past the age of 5 - two terrible facts that we can help make better with access to clean water. Knowing that made the DRC an especially appropriate choice for me this year, being a woman, becoming a mom, and having Kase, whom I want to live a long and healthy life!

Looking forward to 2012, I am really excited to work with Voss Foundation and Virgin Unite again and can't wait to announce our next project.

We couldn't do any of this without you all, so I especially want to thank everyone who has made a donation to Project Clean Water and Give A Drop to help us change all these people's lives in Africa.

So please continue to support us by visiting http://www.giveadrop.com or texting DROP to 89544 to make a difference for less than the cost of a bottle of water.